This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 18th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Health Insurance Co-op is the alternative of the moment.

Will it spur the choice and competition the Obama administration says it wants Americans

to have?

Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, comments on the state of the debate.

The President's strategy for passing health care reform initially was to ram it through Congress

before anyone had a chance to read it. That didn't

work. Now the president's strategy is really to try to deceive the American

public about what's in the bill and that's not working very well because the

American public is reading the health care bills that are before Congress.

They're learning how the President's health plan would affect their coverage, their quality of their care,

the cost of their care, as well as the federal deficit,

and they don't like what they see.

And so the president's been losing the debate over health care reform this August.

And so what we saw this weekend was the President's Secretary of Health and Human Services,

Kathleen Sebelia, said, well, we don't need to have what they call the public option

or a Medicare-like program for people under age 65,

we don't need to have that in the health care reform plan.

We could have, say, these co-ops that they're trying to develop in the Senate.

Well, this seems like a big game changer.

It seems like the administration is softening its approach, it's moderating its approach to health

reform, when really that's not what they're doing at all.

...